Timeless Adventures (18 page)

In the news at almost the exact time of
Genesis of the Daleks
’ first broadcast, the tragedy of Cambodia and the Pol Pot Khmer Rouge regime of the mid-1970s showed that such fascism wasn’t a thing of the past. Mass extermination of perceived enemies was a key Khmer Rouge tool, a policy echoed in the Daleks’ ultimate practices. The Doctor, however, sees a bigger picture: ‘Many enemies will become allies because of the Daleks.’ In the end, he adopts a liberal compromise, setting Dalek development back by a thousand years.

When
Doctor Who
returned to television in 2005, an early episode, entitled
Dalek
, saw the Daleks recreated once more as a threat to be feared by the Doctor and the audience. Showrunner Russell T Davies referred back to
Genesis of the Daleks
as the first move in the ‘Time War’, an off-screen conflict primarily between the Time Lords and the Daleks that forms the back-story to the new series. This retrospective continuity (known in fan circles as ‘retcon’, see chapter six), makes
Genesis of the Daleks
an even more important story to the series’ narrative history.

The season concluded with
Revenge of the Cybermen
, another returning old monster with a script written by their co-creator Gerry Davis (heavily reworked by script editor Holmes). This, however, lacked the dramatic reinvention accorded the Daleks, simply presenting the Cybermen as an almost generic robotic threat, attempting to wipe out Voga, a planet rich in gold content, as gold is deadly to the Cybermen. In a Letts-inspired, cost-cutting exercise,
Revenge of the
Cybermen
was filmed immediately after, and on the same space-station sets as
The Ark in Space
, with the narrative set on the same station at a different point in time. This was a cleverly economical use of resources, one not often repeated (but used by the new series producers, both on the 2005 series, with the space-station setting of
The Long Game
and
Bad Wolf
, and in the 2006 series, again in episodes featuring the Cybermen, where mid-season two-parter
The
Age of Steel/Rise of the Cybermen
was shot back-to-back with season finale
Army of Ghosts/Doomsday
).

This first season overseen by Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes provided clear signposts of the direction the show would be taking. Although much of the material and approach had, of necessity, been inherited, the new team had put enough of their individual stamp on
Doctor Who
to make it distinct from the preceding Jon Pertwee period.
The Ark in Space
was a clear marker of the gothic direction in which Hinchcliffe and Holmes would take the show, while
Genesis
of the Daleks
showed how their ‘serious’ approach to the drama, and the themes it could contain, would pay off in terms of audience popularity. The average audience for the season was 11.5 million, a definite step forward from the first five years of the 1970s.

It was with the following season, the show’s thirteenth, that Hinchcliffe and Holmes’ modus operandi became clear: literary pastiche wrapped in B-movie homage. This was a new spin on the
Doctor Who
formula and gave fresh life to a show that was heading towards a decade and a half on air. ‘We were led sometimes to revisit some of the motifs that had worked in the past [in literature], but we wanted to reinterpret them through the format of
Doctor Who
,’ explained Hinchcliffe.

The season 13 opener had been intended to close-out the previous season, but was held over as the debut of the series was moved to August from its traditional New Year slot.
Terror of the Zygons
saw the final appearance of the true UNIT ‘family’, with both the Brigadier and Harry Sullivan making their final appearances as regulars (Harry briefly returns, after a fashion, in the mid-season
The Android
Invasion
). The ‘Doctor-travelling-with-single-female-companion’ model, as used by Letts, returns here, cementing Elisabeth Sladen’s Sarah Jane Smith as one of the series’ most fondly remembered companions (and the only one to make multiple comebacks outside of anniversary celebration stories).

With its Scottish setting and guest appearance by the Loch Ness monster (a rather poorly realised puppet standing in for a supposedly remote-controlled alien robot),
Terror of the Zygons
relates directly to the 1970s outbreak of Nessie monster sightings, a perennial happening since the first twentieth-century sighting in 1933. Although oil rigs feature in the opening of the story, the then-ongoing nationalist political battles over ‘Scotland’s oil’ only feature in passing in early dialogue. Holmes and Hinchcliffe were inspired by loss-of-identity Hollywood B-movies from the 1950s like
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
(1956) and
I Married a Monster from Outer Space
(1958). The invading Zygons (giant, orange, embryo-like creatures who made a huge visual impact, but have yet to recur onscreen) are shape-shifters, able to impersonate anyone. Relocating this body-snatching theme to the Scottish Highlands allowed writer Robert Banks Stewart to ally the theme to Scottish myths and legends like that of the Selkie (supernatural creatures able to transform from seals to humans).

There was another Scottish connection in the second story of the season. Robert Louis Stevenson’s
The Strange Tale of Dr Jekyll and
Mr Hyde
and the 1956 film
Forbidden Planet
(by way of Shakespeare’s
The Tempest
) provided the literary and pop-culture inspirations for
Planet of Evil
. Writer Louis Marks (who’d previously scripted environmental-thriller story
Planet of Giants
in 1964) adapted Professor Jim Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis (that sees the Earth as a self-regulating organic system) to create a planet that is fundamentally evil. However, this intention is lost in the realisation of the story, which focuses more on Professor Sorenson’s split personality and the were-wolf-horror aspects of the plot than on any abstract notion. An expedition to the planet Zeta Minor finds a mysterious black pool: a gateway to an anti-matter universe. Attempting to harness the power of the anti-matter (a critique of the damage done by mineral exploitation to Earth), the expedition members are either killed or transformed. The monsters, supposedly protecting the planet from the invaders, are invisible and are only seen when struck by weapons fire. The realisation of the creature is like that in
Forbidden Planet
, while the Shakespearean connection comes from
The Tempest
.

The literary source in the case of
Pyramids of Mars
was Bram Stoker’s 1903 novel
The Jewel of the Seven Stars
– about an archaeologist’s attempt to revive an ancient mummy – mixed with a heavy dose of Von Daniken. Just as relevant, and perhaps fresh in the audience’s mind, was the 1972 UK ‘Treasures of Tutankhamun’ exhibition that revived memories of the ‘cursed’ Howard Carter expedition of 1922. Over 1.5 million people visited the British Museum and the display of artefacts was a cultural sensation in the press. In addition, Robert Holmes (who scripted this serial under a pseudonym) was a fan of Hammer movies from 20 years previously (and would have been aware of the Universal mummy movies of the 1930s featuring Boris Karloff). ‘Bob liked to rework some of the old themes of Sax Rohmer [Fu Manchu]-type stuff and some of the more gothic pool of material that provided action-adventure stuff,’ admitted Hinchcliffe.

Pyramids of Mars
drew on the myths of the Egyptian gods and provided a scientific-seeming overlay to make the whole thing science fiction, a regular gambit during the Hinchcliffe period. Set in 1911, the story sees trapped alien God Sutekh manipulate (from his prison on Mars) Egyptologist Marcus Scarman. He instructs Scarman to construct a missile (with his robotic, mummy-like helpers) that can destroy the beacon on Mars that his fellow Osirans used to entrap him centuries ago. The setting allowed the BBC design teams to excel once again with the period-drama trappings of the locations, while the actual pyramid is a rather bland corridors-and-puzzles setup, as last seen in
Death to the Daleks
.

Hinchcliffe said of
Pyramids of Mars
: ‘It’s a historical show, but imaginative in the way that it combines the science-fictional element with the historical situation. There’s some very nice characterisation and some very nice acting, and a bit of humour in it. It did seem to combine everything that Bob and I were trying to do. It’s a typical ‘good one’ from us. I think [our stories have] got the qualities of a costume drama because people are very good at doing that at the BBC, but I think the stories were very different. We weren’t trying to be educational in any way!’

Despite an atmospheric opening set in a seemingly deserted English village, Terry Nation’s script for the next story,
The Android Invasion
, is a muddled affair that reverts to standard Earth invasion and body snatching doubles before the end. The initial set-up is intriguing, however, even if its main cultural source appears to be Nation’s own post-apocalypse series,
Survivors
(1975–77). The ‘duplicate village’ idea was one from spy fiction (or real-life myths about foreign spies), where they were used for training purposes to familiarise agents with environments they’d be invading. The same training function is served by the village the Doctor and Sarah land in. The android part of the invasion came from popular 1970s movies like
Westworld
(1973) and
The Stepford Wives
(1975, based on the 1972 novel), which director Barry Letts directly references visually more than once. Notable is the cliff-hanger to episode two in which the duplicate Sarah’s face falls off, revealing her robotic innards. It’s a minor, confused tale that serves simply as a breather before the gothic double bill that closed out the thirteenth season of
Doctor Who
.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern
Prometheus
is the most obvious gothic literary source for
The Brain of Morbius
, in which the brain of an executed Time Lord war criminal (and their former leader) is being prepared by mad scientist Solon (Philip Madoc, an actor who’d appeared in several guest roles over the years) for transplant into a body constructed from the parts of various alien species. A second strong influence is HG Wells’ novel
The Island of Dr Moreau
, which deals with cross-species pollination, an underlying theme in
The Brain of Morbius
(some of Solon’s dialogue even appears to be quoting from Wells’ book). Also present on the planet Karn, along with Solon and the remains of Morbius, are an un-ageing, mysterious Sisterhood who are the guardians of the ‘sacred flame’ that produces a life-giving elixir which aids Time Lord regeneration. They have kept an eye on Solon’s activities (while being unaware that Morbius has survived). The Sisterhood appears to have been inspired by Victorian adventure novelist H Rider-Haggard’s
She
(the 1965 film version would have been familiar to Holmes, who again contributed the bulk of the writing, reworking a script by Terrance Dicks). Hinchcliffe admitted that the Hammer movies ‘influenced Bob a little, but they never influenced me’, claiming Rider-Haggard or John Buchan were more his style. ‘Both Bob and myself were probably in that tradition.’

As so often with
Doctor Who
, the ideas and the writing are let down by the realisation. The ‘castle’ and ‘laboratory’ interiors are well done (Solon has adapted an old fuel refinery), and the lair of the Sisterhood of Karn features some great set decoration, but the exterior scenes take place on a planetary surface constructed in the studio. The cliffs over which the characters clamber on their journeys between locations sound exactly like wooden flats painted to look like rock. ‘The big challenge was that we didn’t have any post-production,’ admitted Hinchcliffe, explaining why the visuals of the show sometimes didn’t match up to the ambition of the scripts. ‘Everything had to be completed in the studio or during the bit of filming that you had. When you were being very ambitious with some of the effects, you were never quite sure whether they were going to work out, and neither were the special-effects guys! They were limited by time and money. You can’t say they were no good: most of them were excellent. But even the really good stories have some effects that worked well and others that didn’t. It’s the time element.’

The all-studio
Brain of Morbius
gave way to a six-episode, location-shot season finale,
The Seeds of Doom
, which drew heavily on the Christian Nyby/Howard Hawks 1951 film
The Thing from Another
World
(later remade in 1982 by John Carpenter as
The Thing
). Opening in the Antarctic as a research team are taken over by an alien-pod-from-outer-space, the story climaxes in a pastiche of
The Avengers
. Mad botanist Harrison Chase wants to secure the pod for himself, but instead unleashes a giant Krynoid monster that proceeds to eat his house. Hard edged and fairly violent,
The Seeds of Doom
is a combination thriller and horror film, with the Doctor and Sarah thrown into the mix. One entire episode sees them trapped in a cottage under siege. The monster plant’s plot origins may have been obvious, but
Doctor Who
put a new spin on it. The first two episodes are a pretty shameless remake of
The Thing from Another World
, but soon the action switches to the British countryside and the threat mutates into another retelling of
King Kong
, the giant Krynoid monster rampaging across the countryside.

Costume-drama techniques were to the fore in the opening tale of the following season,
The Masque of Mandragora
. After accidentally picking up some malevolent ‘Mandragora energy’, the TARDIS takes the Doctor and Sarah to Renaissance Italy (filmed on location in Portmeirion, Wales, where much of the 1960s espionage show
The Prisoner
was filmed) where they try to prevent a cult from realising
their (alien-assisted) plan of plunging the world back into the Dark Ages. ‘For the following seasons we wanted to try and bring in some more interesting settings,’ noted Hinchcliffe, ‘where the stories would go in time and space, whether historically or out into space.’